[rabbitmq-discuss] dealing with poison-pill messages

Mon Mar 19 11:07:17 GMT 2012

Hello there,

I am aware the topic is marked as "planned" in rabbitmq's roadmap, but
I'd like to have your opinion of a quick-and-dirty way to handle this.

So the issue here is that we want to deal with:
- the case where a consumer crashes or is stopped in the middle of
processing a message (we want the message to be sent to another
consumer)
- the case where a message is somehow corrupted and cause any consumer
to crash (we don't want all our consumers to crash)

Here is a solution proposal, using a special flag (I used
delivery.getProperties().getType()) on the message. When a consumer
get a message:
a) if isRedeliver=false and flag=false, consumer processes the message
the regular way, then it acks the message
b) if isRedeliver=true and flag=false, consumer duplicates message,
then enable the flag on the duplicated message, then send this new
message to its own queue and acks the original message without
actually processing it
c) if isRedeliver=false and flag=true, consumer knows that this
message may cause it to crash, but it will try to process it
d) if is Redeliver=true and flag=true, consumer knows that this
message already caused two consumers to crash, so it will acknowledge
the message without even processing it.

In case of a poison-pill scenario, steps a b c d will happen in that
very order and at most two consumers will die.

There is a corner case though: if during steps a) and c) consumer is
killed by something else, a message may be considered as harmful
whereas it is not. But that should not happen very often.

What do you think?

Thanks

John